Joshua Soenario






MOVING IMAGE
Slimy & Sticky
Big Bellied Snail

BOOK
In Between
Slow or Slower



About

Contact
joshuasoenario@gmail.com
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In Between / 2025
Book size: 180mm x 238mm
Pages: 136pages,  37 images
Binding: Perfect






I have long regarded ‘myopia’ as a privileged third mode of observation that exists between seeing and not seeing. When I take off my glasses, the world softens. Edges dissolve, shapes melt into one another, and light becomes a gentle haze. I deeply cherish this visual privilege—removing my glasses liberates me from the inevitable fate of visual perception (to see is to know, to know is to see), while this physical limitation paradoxically expands my sensory freedom. I frequently practice this ocular relaxation ritual, though strictly in private, as my appearance undergoes a remarkable transformation with or without glasses.




To you, holding this book: I hope these images feel like a conversation, not a statement. I hope they invite you to see the moments when the world slips out of focus and becomes something more, to let go of the need for clarity and certainty. As Teju Cole observes in his essay for Rinko Kawauchi's M/E: "When one gently places a hand in flowing water, the flow is not stopped but the hand's presence alters the shape of things downstream. Great books of photography redirect one’s perception this way." Rather than imposing a specific sensory framework, I wish to inspire cognitive independence between perception and interpretation through this book.




Yet as Merleau-Ponty contends in Phenomenology of Perception: ‘The body-organism is linked to the world through a network of primal significations that arise from the perception of things.’ The corporeal form seems eternally condemned to serve as a connective bridge in the subject-object cognitive relationship between cognition, body, and world. This book serves as a conceptual challenge to that existential predicament.




In the end, this book is not about myopia, or phenomenology, or even photography. It’s about the spaces in between—the moments when we let go of what we think we know and allow ourselves to simply be. Again, as Teju Cole writes for M/E, ‘a stimulating flow of both knowing and not knowing’. And so, I invite you to step into the blur:




To perceive without decoding,

To receive without attending,

To savor without consuming,

To inhale without possessing,

To touch without grasping—




This is how consciousness unlearns

its colonial grip on sensation.

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